In voice-search applications, the need for the speaking person to repeat spoken input is often a frequent occurrence due to speech recognition errors. As a result, automated systems that interact with people via a speech recognition user-interface often make errors that require the user to repeat a request, sometimes multiple times. For example, in an automated speech-recognized telephone directory assistance system, the user may say something like “Police Department,” which initially gets recognized as “P Street Apartments,” and causes the user to have to repeat the request or attempt some new variation thereof.
The occurrence of repeated requests is quite common across multiple types of automated systems, including directory assistance systems, account access systems and multimodal systems. Indeed, analysis of log records indicates that in some systems, approximately half of all initiated interactions result in repetition. Any improvement in lowering the repetition rate is beneficial.